Succession Planning

Qualified Planning for Business Succession & Exits

Creating and building personal financial wealth from middle market business assets requires a varied, often complex, and sometimes difficult transition process. Because middle market business owners are specialists in running a business—not in steering successful transitions—Deal Capital and its affiliates offer middle market business owners a unique Wealth Transition Advisory service.

The important role of successful change management within an organization should never be overlooked. Today’s succession planners play a key role in workforce and replacement management at all levels of the organization, not just with the CEO. In many cases, succession management involves a reactive approach to the impending retirement of key individuals within the organization. The evolution of the succession philosophies of yesteryear has helped today’s succession planners take a more holistic approach at workforce and change management consulting.

Acting much like personal trainers, our wealth transition advisory professionals help the owner of a privately-held middle market company maximize the structure and pricing of any alternative that provides liquidity. Our corporate transition partners have a thorough knowledge of all of the financial services required by a privately-held company including trust and estate services, bank credit, asset based lending, mezzanine, and equity financing and mergers and acquisitions.

While key differences exist between succession, workforce and change management, their inter-connectivity increases the demand for more stalwart and effective change managers. Each component of the process can provide necessary order to the chaos that results from managing corporate change. Starting the process early and involving workforce and succession best practices ensures the highest probability for transition success. Because various components of change management are so interconnected each component is really only as good as other components.

Unfortunately, less succession planning occurs in business than is generally necessary. For instance, for some the successor may not be properly schooled in the nuances of the corporate hierarchy to successfully transition from one business to another. In addition, it is often assumed that the best trainer/role-model for the succeeding manager is the current representative, which can also be flawed. Finally, there is some debate as to whether internal or external hiring for succession will provide the greatest benefit to the overall organization.

With the growing scrutiny over failed succession processes, planning your company’s transition is more important today than ever. Many companies are reevaluating the way they perform transitions from one generation of managers to another. The greatest measure of effective change management is sustainable leadership development that brings later managers from the lower ranks of the current organization. This sustainable leadership advantage provides highly-qualified leaders from within the organization for years to come. Our network of successful business owners helps to identify key components of a successful transition and works with the owner from start to finish.

A member of the DealCapital wealth transition advisory team aids both buyers and sellers in a proper transition process. Sessions are educational for the middle market business owner who learns the language that investors, buyers, and investment bankers use as well as the rules-of–the-road for successful transactions.

With each client engagement we maintain rigorous and disciplined adherence to pre-determined end goals, delivering expert results throughout a vague, fragmented and difficult process.